Reduction in Secondary Losses in Turbine Cascade Using Contoured Boundary Layer Fence

Present work deals with reducing secondary losses in turbine cascade by using boundary layer fences in two ways. Firstly, to reduce the strength of vortex which is incident at the leading edge of airfoil and hence reduce the strength of horse shoe vortex, and secondly, to reduce the pressure gradient between the pressure side and the suction side in the flow passage region between airfoils. In previous works, the boundary layer fence followed the profile of airfoil. In this publication, boundary layer fence does not follow the profile of airfoil i.e stagger and camber of boundary fence is different when compared to airfoil. A profiled boundary layer fence is proposed in the present work which reduces the incident vorticity and also reduces pressure gradient from pressure side to suction side. Such boundary layer fence was checked on T106 test cascade which is available as open literature. Numerical work is carried out using commercial software Ansys CFX. Viscous RANS simulations are carried out using k-ω SST turbulence model with yplus value around unity on all walls. Coefficient of secondary kinetic energy (CSKE) and Secondary Kinetic energy helicity (SKEH) are used as target functions. Total pressure loss is also monitored. All the three functions show a reduction in secondary loss. The strength of horse shoe vortex is reduced by the fence protruding in front of leading edge. The converging flow passage created by the fence near the pressure side of airfoil reduces the pressure gradient from pressure side to suction side. The total pressure loss was reduced by 1.5 % and CSKE was improved by 36 % when the boundary layer fence was adopted.